Second argument: who wrote the laws?

Back to the desert. This time you find on the sand not a glass ball, but a sophisticated watch. Here you no longer ask only “where did it come from?” It is immediately clear to you that someone designed it. Something so complex and precise does not come into being by itself. Our Sages formulated this about two thousand years ago, when a heretic asked Rabbi Akiva who created the world, and he answered: just as a house testifies to the builder, so the world testifies to the one who created it.

David Hume already objected to the parable of the watch. He argued: about watches we know from experience that human beings make them. About the universe and about living creatures we have no such experience, and so no comparison can be made. But this claim does not hold. Imagine that the one who finds the watch in the sand is a tribesman who has never seen how watches are made. Will he conclude that the watch came into being by chance? Certainly not. The very precise and purposeful structure of the watch testifies to design, even without knowing who designed it and how. And if we found a technological object on Mars, it would be clear to us at once that an intelligent being made it, even though we have never seen how such things are made. There is also a lesson here from experience itself: we know complex creations that we know were designed, and complex creations that we do not know how they came to be. But we do not know even one complex creation that we know for certain came into being without design.

Our world is far more like a watch than like a glass ball. It is orderly, and it runs according to astonishingly precise laws. The previous argument asked why the world exists. This argument asks why it is like this: orderly, complex, coordinated. And therefore, by the way, it works even if the world had always existed. Even an eternal world needs an explanation for the order within it.

The mistake to beware of

Precisely here one must beware of a common mistake, into which many believers fall. They say: “Science does not yet know how to explain how life came into being, a sign that God did it.” This is called the “God of the gaps,” and one should not build on it. What science does not know today, it may know tomorrow. A gap in knowledge is a reason to investigate, not a reason to draw conclusions about God. A good argument must stand even if science succeeds in explaining everything. So let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that science really will explain everything: the origin of life, its development, everything. The argument stands even then.

There is also a “scientific” version of the argument, which uses a well-known physical law: in a closed system, disorder always increases. A flowerpot that falls shatters, but shards do not reassemble themselves into a pot. So how does order arise? Here too one must be careful. If this were a genuinely scientific proof, God would be part of physics, and all physicists would be believers. And there is a further reason. The second law speaks of the total disorder in a system, and so there is nothing to prevent order from increasing in one area at the expense of disorder in another. One can build houses in one area by quarrying stones in another: in the area of the houses order increases, in the quarry it decreases, and the law is not violated. So the law itself is not really needed for the argument. What is needed is only the simple intuition behind it: a complex thing does not come into being by itself. And that was understood long before there was thermodynamics.

The right argument: from the laws

To understand the argument, one needs to know one concept: evolution. This is the process by which, according to science, living creatures changed gradually over millions of years, from simple creatures up to human beings. The process works like this: in every generation there are small random changes, and whoever the change helped to survive reproduces more. Many think that if evolution is true, there is no further need for God.

To understand why this is not so, let us start from an old claim of believers: a monkey tapping randomly on a keyboard will never write the sentence “to be or not to be.” The chance of that is nil. So too, said the believers, a complex living creature will not come into being by chance.

The scientific magazine Scientific American published a reply in the form of a computer experiment. The computer types letters at random, exactly like the monkey. But there is one difference: whenever a correct letter happens to come out, it is “locked” in place and no longer changes. The result: the complete sentence is written within minutes. The magazine’s message: this is how evolution works too. A useful random change gets “locked in,” because whoever has it survives and passes it on. And therefore there is no need for a designer.

But think for a moment about what the experiment actually showed. The computer succeeded only because someone wrote it a rule: “lock every correct letter.” Without the rule, the monkey would have typed forever. In other words, the experiment did not show that randomness alone creates order. It showed that randomness creates order only when there is a rule that directs it. And who wrote the rule? So too in nature. Evolution works, but only thanks to laws of nature that allow it to work, laws that turn something utterly improbable into something that happens. Seen this way, evolution does not weaken the argument but strengthens it: a process that reaches its target again and again is precisely what looks directed.

And who wrote the laws? Imagine a factory that works in perfect coordination. Someone says: “There is no need for a manager here; on the wall hang rules that tell every worker what to do.” That is true, but the question has not disappeared. It has only moved one step back: who wrote the rules on the wall, and who makes sure they are kept? So too a washing machine: it works according to laws, and that is exactly what shows that someone designed it.

Here one must distinguish between two questions. The question “how did the process happen?” is a scientific question, within the laws, and science answers it. The question “where do the laws come from?” is a different question, outside the laws, and science does not answer it at all. And if someone says “the laws simply always existed,” he has not answered: eternal laws also need an explanation. Why precisely these laws, and not others?

Science itself sharpens the question. The laws of physics contain constant numbers, for example how strong the force of gravity is. There is no logical reason for them to be precisely as they are. And scientists have discovered that if they were different even slightly, stars, planets and life could not exist. This is called “fine-tuning,” and it demands an explanation.

“But it’s chance”

The most common answer is that there is randomness in evolution, and so there is no need for a guiding hand. It is worth thinking for a moment about what “chance” even is. When a die is thrown, the result looks random. But in fact it is entirely determined by the laws of physics. It is simply hard for us to calculate. There may be “genuine” randomness in the world of the very small, but even that is disputed.

And the main point: randomness too operates within a framework, and the framework is what decides. Take a biased coin, whose chance of landing on “heads” is 70 percent. Every single toss is random, and one cannot know in advance what will come out. But after a million tosses, “heads” will have come out about 700,000 times. Who determined the overall result? Not chance, but the coin. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould gave the parable of a drunk walking along a narrow sidewalk. On one side a wall, on the other a ditch. Every step he takes is entirely random. But when he bumps into the wall he is pushed back, and so in the end he will always fall into the ditch. The randomness is real, but the end is known in advance, because the wall and the ditch determine it. So too in evolution. And if a “random” process reaches a particular target again and again, that actually strengthens the impression that there is intention.

“Every outcome is rare”

There is a cleverer answer, which must be understood properly. It says: “After something has happened, there is no point talking about ‘how unlikely it was.’ Every outcome of a lottery is equally rare, and yet someone always wins. So too the universe: any universe that came into being would look ‘special’ to whoever lived in it.”

The answer to this is simple. True, every lottery ticket is equally rare. But if one person wins the lottery a hundred times in a row, no one will say “that too is as rare as any other outcome.” Everyone will understand that someone rigged the draw. The same with a die that lands on 6 a hundred times in a row. Why? Because there are outcomes that are special in advance, and not only “special because they came out.” A hundred wins in a row is such an outcome.

And our universe is such an outcome, for three reasons. First, a world with life is genuinely rare. Most possible systems of laws would have created nothing, not even stars. And even in our universe, with all its billions of stars, only one star is known to have life on it. Second, “order” is not a matter of taste. Physicists know how to measure how ordered a system is, just as one measures temperature. A heap of sand is a disordered system, and a living cell is a very ordered system, and this is measured in numbers. Third, the order in the universe does not disappear. It has been stable and developing for billions of years. On a computer one can create “complex” structures by chance, but they fall apart at once.

Incidentally, science itself thinks exactly this way. There is a large scientific project called SETI, which searches for intelligent life in space. How will it recognize it? It listens to radio signals from space, and looks in them for an order that nature does not produce: for instance, a transmission on a narrow, constant frequency, since natural sources in space transmit on broad, disordered frequencies. If such a signal arrives, the scientists will announce: there is someone intelligent out there. In other words, from order they infer intelligence. And if so for a radio signal, why not for the whole universe?

There is another atheist answer, and it sounds strong: “You say that a complex thing testifies to a maker. But a snowflake is an astonishingly complex and precise structure, and it forms by itself, from water vapor that freezes. And a baby, the most complex creature we know, forms by itself, from a single cell. No one ‘builds’ them. A sign that complexity does not testify to a maker.” That is a correct answer to someone who speaks of complexity alone. But notice how the snowflake forms. It forms because the laws of physics determine that water molecules freeze in precisely this shape. And the baby forms because the laws of biology run a complete program written in the first cell. They form “by themselves” only in the sense that no human being built them. But they form thanks to laws, and without the laws there would be no snowflake and no baby. In other words, these examples do not show that complexity arises from nothing. They show that complexity arises thanks to laws, and that is our question again: where do the laws come from?

“We wouldn’t be here to ask”

Another common answer is called the “anthropic principle”: if the world were not suited to life, we would not be here to ask. So there is nothing to wonder at. The physicist Stephen Hawking explained the principle with a parable: a man stands before a firing squad of skilled marksmen, they all miss, and he remains alive. According to Hawking, he should not be surprised, because if they had hit him, he would not be here to be surprised. But think where this leads. By this principle, no strange coincidence by which I was saved should surprise me. But if exactly the same coincidence happened to someone else, I am allowed to be surprised. That is of course absurd. The survivor must ask, exactly like any bystander, why all the marksmen missed. The fact that he remained alive does not explain it.

Then comes the sophisticated version: “There are infinitely many universes, and only in ours did it come out right.” If there had been a million executions and one failed, there would really be no wonder. But no one has seen another universe, and there is no way to check whether one exists. It is true that there are models in physics that propose multiple universes, but they are hypotheses, not observations. And the main point: even if there is a “universe generator” that produces universes without end, it itself works according to laws. Who wrote them? The question merely moves one stage back, exactly as in the parable of the factory. Atheists like to quote the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said: if someone claims that there is a small teapot orbiting in space, and it cannot be seen, we will not believe him, and there is no need to prove that it does not exist. So too, he said, with God. But for the teapot there is no evidence at all, and for God there is: this orderly world. And it is precisely the “infinitely many universes” that are the real teapot. No one has seen them, they cannot be seen, and yet they are assumed, only in order not to reach God.

“Who designed God?”

This question is presented by Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist biologist, as his decisive answer: if complexity demands a designer, then God is more complex than all his creation, and so who designed him? Here one must understand how an explanation works. An explanation can be good even if it does not explain itself. If a sophisticated device were found on Mars, we would understand at once that intelligent beings built it, even without any idea who created them. The Big Bang theory explains well what scientists see in their telescopes, even if no one knows what caused the Big Bang itself. An explanation can be successful even if it does not explain everything. And there is a further mistake here. Dawkins assumes that God is “complex,” and so needs a designer. But long before Dawkins, philosophers and theologians argued that God is not complex at all, but simple in the highest degree. The rule “a complex thing demands a designer” is learned from the material creations we know. There is no reason to apply it to one who is neither material nor complex.

“God is not an explanation”

The physicist Elia Leibowitz argued: “A good explanation explains the unfamiliar by means of the familiar. But you explain the familiar, the world, by means of the unfamiliar, God. That is not an explanation.” The answer: Isaac Newton, the English scientist who discovered the law of gravity, also never saw a “force of attraction.” He saw that objects fall and that there are tides, and he proposed a force that no one knew, in order to explain this. It is exactly the same way of thinking. This is how great discoveries are born: not by explaining the new by means of the old, but by proposing something new that explains what we see. The only difference is that the claim about God cannot be tested by experiment, and so it is not “science.” But the form of thinking is identical.

It is worth adding a distinction here. A story: a young man fell ill with jaundice. Someone brought a “folk healer,” who placed pigeons on his body, and the next day the jaundice was gone. The parents, educated people, scoffed: “Nonsense, there is no medical explanation for it.” But notice what they did. There was a fact, which happened before their eyes, and they rejected it.1 Why? Not because it did not happen, but because they had no way to explain it. A rational person does the opposite: he accepts a fact reported from a reliable source, even when it has no explanation, and then looks for an explanation. Whoever rejects every fact that does not fit his view is not rational but dogmatic, even if he calls himself a “man of science.” And that is exactly what someone does who says: “I will not conclude that God exists, because that is not scientific.” The argument shows him something, and he rejects it not because of a flaw in the argument, but because of a preconception.

What the argument proves, and what it does not

It must also be said honestly what this argument does not prove. Some atheists mock: “Why God, of all things? Maybe a flying spaghetti monster? And why one and not a thousand?” They are right about one thing: the argument proves only that there is at least one intelligent agent, powerful enough to create such a world. It says nothing more about him: no commandments, no revelation, no unity. This is the “God of the philosophers,” not yet the God of the Torah. The continuation has to be built.

And some say: “So the laws themselves are the first cause.” But laws are not things that act. They are a description of how things act. And if someone insists that the laws are an intelligent entity that runs the world, he has really said “God” in other words.

And some also say: “Better to remain in wonder and not decide.” But there are only two possibilities here: either there is an agent, or the complex world came into being by itself. The chance of the second possibility is minuscule. So “staying in the middle” is not a neutral position. It is a choice of the less probable possibility.

This argument completes the first one. The first argument left two questions open: perhaps the first cause is just a blind “machine”? And perhaps the world always existed? The second argument closes both. Whoever wrote such precise laws is intelligent. And an orderly world, even if it is eternal, needs an intelligent explanation.